Evaluation of the Pharmacy Safety Climate Questionnaire in European community pharmacies

To evaluate the internal reliability, factor structure and construct validity of the Pharmacy Safety Climate Questionnaire (PSCQ) when applied to a pan-European sample of community pharmacies.

A cross-sectional survey design was used.

Community pharmacies in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Great Britain.

A total of 4105 members of the community pharmacy workforce, all drawn from one of the five participating countries.

Each participant completed a copy of the Pharmacy Safety Climate Questionnaire in his or her respective language and rated the perceived safety of the pharmacy in which he or she worked.

Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the data identified four factors that accounted for item responses, with 24 of the original 34 items loading onto them. They were labelled organizational learning, blame culture, working conditions and safety focus. These factors were found to have an acceptable level of reliability (with Cronbach's alpha values ranging from 0.70 to 0.92) and to predict the rating of pharmacy safety.

This study provided information on the PSCQ's psychometric properties when used in community pharmacies in different European countries. A modified version of the original PSCQ (known as PSCQ-4) is presented, and further work is proposed to demonstrate its application to safety improvements in pharmacies.